{% include "includes/auth/janrain/signIn_traditional.html" with message='It looks like you are already verified. If you still have trouble signing in, you probably need a new confirmation link email.' %}

Van Ryzin: Austin arts scene may have turned a corner in 2012

Van Ryzin: Austin arts scene may have turned a corner in 2012

Tracing an overview of the year’s news in the arts actually begins in the final days of 2011.

In fact, 2012 lacked many of the headline-grabbing news stories of major arts woes — or victories — that characterized much of the last decade.

Instead, there were smaller signs that perhaps a corner had been turned.

End of an era

Just before New Years Eve last year, Austin Lyric Opera announced that it had closed on the sale of its purpose-built headquarters at Barton Springs Road and Bouldin Avenue.

Designed by celebrated San Antonio architecture firm Lake Flato, the building had opened in 2000. With soundproof studios, a rehearsal space large enough to accommodate an entire opera orchestra and facilities for a community music school, the building was strategically sited across the street from where arts leaders envisioned transforming the Palmer Auditorium into a new civic performing arts center (now the Long Center).

The opera raised $4.5 million in private monies for its new headquarters. Every meeting room and paving brick bore the name of a donor, it seemed.

In many ways the opera’s building marked the beginning of a decade-long arts building boom and major organizational growth spurt in Austin that nevertheless continued through several economic cycles.

And the sale of the opera building last year — necessary for the cash-strapped organization to pay down more than $2 million in debt — perhaps signaled that a bottom had been reached after the 2008 fiscal meltdown that adversely affected every arts organization.

New leaders

In February, two months after the opera finalized the sale of its building, ALO leaders announced they had selected a new general director — Joseph Specter, a mid-level manager from the Metropolitan Opera in New York.

And then in June, AMOA-Arthouse — the merged entity of the once-beleaguered Austin Museum of Art and the Congress Avenue contemporary art center Arthouse — announced that it had named its first executive director, Louis Grachos, director of the Albright-Knox Gallery in Buffalo, N.Y.

Both appointments mean that top positions at Austin’s major arts organizations are now filled after a couple of years of leadership shuffling.

Though less headline-grabbing, Austin’s indie and artist-driven scene kept the creative vibe percolating and progressing.

The organizers behind the super-successful East Austin Studio Tour launched a companion West Austin Studio Tour in the spring to involve the ever-growing creative community. And EAST held its own against the potentially city-choking crowds in town for Austin’s first Formula One race in November. Despite the influx of race fans, people still flocked to EAST.

In fact, Big Medium — the nonprofit organization behind EAST and the Texas Biennial — will be the anchor tenant at Canopy, a rehabilitated East Austin warehouse on Springdale Road that will soon house artist studios, creative office spaces, art galleries and a cafe. Though backed by a consortium of private developers, Canopy nevertheless represents an kind of arts-focused development of East Austin that is not trying to override what has distinguished the neighborhood’s rising profile.

And musicians’ collectives such as New Music Co-op, Fast Forward and Golden Hornet continued to erase stale divisions between classical and popular music — and for that matter the definition of what constitutes “live music” in the town — with innovative happenings such as a composer’s competition structured like college basketball’s Sweet 16 and played live by the genre-crossing Tosca String Quartet.

New venue

If the past decade of arts news reads as tale after tale of the successes, or non-successes, of Austin arts building projects, 2012 did see the opening of one long anticipated venue.

In September, Zach Theatre debuted its $22 million Topfer Theatre. The venue is the third theater to join Zach’s campus, which occupies city parkland at South Lamar Boulevard and Lady Bird Lake.

And while other privately funded arts buildings stumbled, failed or had to be sold, public money saw the Topfer through to completion. Zach leaders leveraged $10.8 million in voter-approved municipal bond monies — nearly 50 percent of the total cost of the Topfer — to build its new 430-seat theater, which is for Zach’s exclusive use. (Like the Topfer, the Long Center also occupies city parkland, but the center was paid for entirely through private donations.)

Unfortunately, aspects of the Topfer’s architecture reinforce that exclusivity. (The theater is designed by Austin firm Andersson Wise Architects, who also designed the W Hotel.)

Though its sleek modern lines and clean contemporary forms complement Austin notions of architectural sophistication, the bright blue venue sits with its backside to the city, only giving one shoulder, as it were, to the lake and its surrounding public trail. The venue’s main entrance instead faces inward, away from public sight.

That thrill of seeing people gathering in front of a theater — think of passing the Paramount Theater on Congress Avenue when people bustle in or seeing a crowd fill the Long Center’s City Terrace — instead remains hidden from public view.

In the end, though it sits on public parkland and was funded by much public money, architecturally the Topfer doesn’t invite entry by all.

Rediscovery

No other arts building project received more attention in the past decade than the plans of a downtown municipal art museum.

With the Austin Museum of Art now merged with Arthouse, and the new institution set with more than $22 million in the bank after selling a prime downtown lot, AMOA-Arthouse has been somewhat biding its time until its new director is in place next month.

But something quietly clicked last spring for the once-beleaguered institution with the popular “Art on the Green” exhibit.

Held on the grounds of historic Laguna Gloria — AMOA’s legacy home, a 12-acre lakeside site in West Austin with an historic villa — “Art on the Green” was a exhibit of fully playable artist-designed mini-golf holes. Each mini-golf hole was designed by a local artist, artist collective, team of architects or landscape designers. Many were emerging professionals or part of the up-and-coming tribe of visual arts creators that have independently been making a scene.

Laguna Gloria has been relatively off-the-radar as an arts destination since the quest for a downtown museum began in the 1980s. And yet “Art on the Green” attracted 11,400 visitors, more than any other exhibit ever at Laguna Gloria. Indeed, several of the younger “Art on the Green” artists themselves told a reporter that they had never been to the Laguna site before receiving the offbeat commission to create a whimsical mini-golf hole.

Perhaps after a tumultuous decade plus of rapid arts expansion and big building dreams not always realized, Austin’s vibrant indie scene and events such as “Art on the Green” bear some heeding. For the current times, working with what we have might just be the way to keep the arts scene vibrant.